The widespread availability of computers and software applications has given organizations a powerful tool with which to create and access information. Within one organization, product information may be structured by different groups such as marketing, sales, accounting, management, maintenance, manufacturing, engineering, research, procurement, quality, analysis, and other branches of the organization, based on their unique information perspectives. Product development organizations are challenged with unifying information from these multiple perspectives while reusing common information, variations within these perspectives, and associated change revisions. What is needed, then, is a way to easily define, share, reuse, unify, and manage structured product information while accommodating the unique representational and process needs of different groups engaged in product lifecycle and business activities. Ideally, the way would provide an easy mechanism to reuse items as well as relationships, while maintaining configuration consistency, information integrity, maximizing reuse, accommodating variability, and ensuring process autonomy.